http://www.lacan.com/zizekchro1.htm
INFLUENCES
The three main influences on Slavoj Zizek's work are G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx and Jacques Lacan
1. Hegel provides Zizek with the type of thought or methodology that he uses. This kind of thinking is called dialectical. In Zizek's reading of Hegel, the dialectic is never finally resolved.
2. Marx is the inspiration behind Zizek's work, for what he is trying to do is to contribute to the Marxist tradition of thought, specifically that of a critique of ideology.
3. Lacan provides Zizek with the framework and terminology for his analysis. Of particular importance are Lacan's three registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. Zizek locates the subject at the interface of the Symbolic and the Real.
The Imaginary
The basis of the imaginary order is the formation of the ego in the "mirror stage". Since the ego is formed by identifying with the counterpart or specular image, "identification" is an important aspect of the imaginary. The relationship whereby the ego is constituted by identification is a locus of "alienation", which is another feature of the imaginary, and is fundamentally narcissistic. The imaginary, a realm of surface appearances which are deceptive, is structured by the symbolic order. It also involves a linguistic dimension: whereas the signifier is the foundation of the symbolic, the "signified" and "signification" belong to the imaginary. Thus language has both symbolic and imaginary aspects. Based on the specular image, the imaginary is rooted in the subject's relationship to the body (the image of the body).
The Symbolic
Although an essentially linguistic dimension, Lacan does not simply equate the symbolic with language, since the latter is involved also in the imaginary and the real. The symbolic dimension of language is that of the signifier, in which elements have no positive existence but are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences. It is the realm of radical alterity: the Other. The unconscious is the discourse of the Other and thus belongs to the symbolic order. Its is also the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. The symbolic is both the "pleasure principle" that regulates the distance from das Ding, and the "death drive" which goes beyond the pleasure principle by means of repetition: "the death drive is only the mask of the symbolic order." This register is determinant of subjectivity; for Lacan the symbolic is characterized by the absence of any fixed relations between signifier and signified.
The Real
This order is not only opposed to the imaginary but is also located beyond the symbolic. Unlike the latter, which is constituted in terms of oppositions such as "presence" and "absence", there is no absence in the real. The symbolic opposition between "presence" and "absence" implies the possibility that something may be missing from the symbolic, the real is "always in its place: it carries it glued to its heel, ignorant of what might exile it from there." If the symbolic is a set of differentiated signifiers, the real is in itself undifferentiated: "it is without fissure". The symbolic introduces "a cut in the real," in the process of signification: "it is the world of words that creates the world of things." Thus the real emerges as that which is outside language: "it is that which resists symbolization absolutely." The real is impossible because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the symbolic order. This character of impossibility and resistance to symbolization lends the real its traumatic quality.
THE SUBJECT
Unlike almost all other kinds of contemporary philosophers, Zizek argues that Descartes' cogito is the basis of the subject. However, whereas most thinkers read the cogito as a substantial, transparent and fully self-conscious "I" which is in complete command of its destiny, Zizek proposes that the cogito is an empty space, what is left when the rest of the world is expelled from itself. The Symbolic Order is what substitutes for the loss of the immediacy of the world and it is where the void of the subject is filled in by the process of subjectivization. The latter is where the subject is given an identity and where that identity is altered by the Self. From his Discourse on Method (1637),Je pense donc je suis,Descartes's original statement which later became Principles of Philosophy (1644), Part 1, article 7: "Ac proinde hæc cognitio, ego cogito, ergo sum, est omnium prima & certissima, quæ cuilibet ordine philosophanti occurrat."
Reading Schelling via Lacan
Once the Lacanian concepts of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real are grasped, Zizek, in philosophical writings such as his discussion of Schelling, always interprets the work of other philosophers in terms of those concepts. This is so because "the core of my entire work is the endeavor to use Lacan as a privileged intellectual tool to re-actualize German idealism". (The Zizek Reader) The reason Zizek thinks German idealism (the work of Hegel, Kant, Fichte and Schelling) needs re-actualizing is that we are thought to understand it in one way, whereas the truth of it is something else. The term "re-actualizing" refers to the fact that there are different possible ways to interpret German idealism, and Zizek wishes to make "actual" one of those possibilities in distinction to the way it is currently realized.
At its most basic, we are taught that German idealism believes that the truth of something could be found in itself. For Zizek, the fundamental insight of German idealism is that the truth of something is always outside it. So the truth of our experience lies outside ourselves, in the Symbolic and the Real, rather than being buried deep within us. We cannot look into our selves and find out who we truly are, because who we truly are is always elsewhere. Our selves are somewhere else in the Symbolic formations which always precede us and in the Real which we have to disavow if we are to enter the Symbolic order.
The reason that Lacan occupies a privileged position for Zizek's lies in Lacan's proposition that self-identity is impossible. The identity of something, its singularity or "oneness", is always split. There is always too much of something, and indivisible remainder, or a bit left-over which means that it cannot be self-identical. The meaning of a word, i.e., can never be found in the word itself, but rather in other words, its meaning therefore is not self-identical. This principle of the impossibility of self-identity is what informs Zizek's reading of the German idealists. In reading Schelling, i.e., the Beginning is not actually the beginning at all - the truth of the Beginning lies elsewhere, it is split or not identical to itself.
How, precisely, does the Word discharge the tension of the rotary motion, how does it mediate the antagonism between the contractile and the expansive force? The Word is a contraction in the guise of its very opposite of an expansion - that is, in pronouncing a word, the subject contracts his being outside himself; he "coagulates" the core of his being in an external sign. In the (verbal) sign, I - as it were - find myself outside myself, I posit my unity outside myself, in a signifier which represents me. (The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters)
The Subject of the Enunciation and the Subject of the Enunciated
The subject of enunciation is the "I" who speaks, the individual doing the speaking; the subject of the enunciated is the "I" of the sentence. "I" is not identical to itself - it is split between the individual "I" (the subject of enunciation) and the grammatical "I" (the subject of the enunciated). Although we may experience them as unified, this is merely an Imaginary illusion, for the pronoun "I" is actually a substitute for the "I" of the subject. It does not account for me in my full specificity; it is, rather, a general term I share with everyone else. In order to do so, my empirical reality must be annihilated or, as Lacan avers, "the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing". The subject can only enter language by negating the Real, murdering or substituting the blood-and-sinew reality of self for the concept of self expressed in words. For Lacan and Zizek every word is a gravestone, marking the absence or corpse of the thing it represents and standing in for it. It is partly in the light of this that Lacan is able to refashion Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" as "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I think not". The "I think" here is the subject of the enunciated (the Symbolic subject) whereas the "I am" is the subject of the enunciation (the Real subject). What Lacan aims to disclose by rewriting the Cartesian cogito in this way is that the subject is irrevocably split, torn asunder by language
The Vanishing Mediator
The concept of "vanishing mediator" is one that Zizek has consistently employed since For They Know Not What They Do. A vanishing mediator is a concept which somehow negotiates and settles - hence mediating - the transition between two opposed concepts and thereafter disappears. Zizek draws attention to the fact that a vanishing mediator is produced by an asymmetry of content and form. As with Marx's analysis of revolution, form lags behind content, in the sense that content changes within the parameters of an existing form, until the logic of that content works its way out to the latter and throws off its husk, revealing a new form in its stead. Commenting Fredric Jameson's "Syntax of Theory" (The Ideologies of Theory, Minnesota, 1988).
The passage from feudalism to Protestantism is not of the same nature as the passage from Protestantism to bourgeois everyday life with its privatized religion. The first passage concerns "content" (under the guise of preserving the religious form or even its strengthening, the crucial shift - the assertion of the ascetic acquisitive stance in economic activity as the domain of manifestation of Grace - takes place), whereas the second passage is a purely formal act, a change of form (as soon as Protestantism is realized as the ascetic acquisitive stance, it can fall off as form). (For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political factor)
Zizek sees in this process evidence of Hegel's "negation of the negation", the third moment of the dialectic. The first negation is the mutation of the content within and in the name of the old form. The second negation is the obsolescence of the form itself. In this way, something becomes the opposite of itself, paradoxically, by seeming to strengthen itself. In the case of Protestantism, the universalism of religious attitudes ultimately led to its being sidelined as a matter of private contemplation. Which is to say that Protestantism, as a negation of feudalism, was itself negated by capitalism.
THE FORMULAS OF SEXUATION
Jouissance
The pleasure principle functions as a limit of enjoyment; it is a law that commands the subject to "enjoy as little as possible". At the same time, the subject constantly attempts to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go "beyond the pleasure principle". The result of transgressing the pleasure principle is not more pleasure, but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this "painful pleasure" is what Lacan calls jouissance: jouissance is suffering. The term expresses the paradoxical satisfaction the subject derives from his symptom, that is the suffering he derives from his own satisfaction.
Woman
Lacan in Encore states that jouissance is essentially phallic: "jouissance, insofar as it is sexual, is phallic, which means that it does not relate to the Other as such." However, Lacan admits a specifically feminine jouissance, a supplementary jouissance which is beyond the phallus, a jouissance of the Other. This feminine jouissance is ineffable, for women experience it but know nothing about it. Going beyond the phallus, it is of the order of the infinite, like mystical ecstasy.
"Woman doesn't exist", la femme n'existe pas, which Lacan rephrases as "there is no such a thing as Woman", il n'y a pas La femme. Lacan questions not the noun "woman", but the definite article which precedes it. For the definite article indicates universality, and this is the characteristic that woman lacks: "woman does not lend herself to generalization, even to phallocentric generalization." He also speaks of her as "not-all", pas toute; unlike masculinity - a universal function founded upon the phallic exception (castration), woman is a non-universal which admits no exception. "Woman as a symptom" (Seminar RSI) means that a woman is a symptom of a man, in the sense that a woman can only ever enter the psychic economy of men as a fantasy object, the cause of their desire.
For Zizek, woman is what sustains the consistency of man; woman non-existence actually represents the radical negativity which constitutes all subjects. The terms "man" and "woman" do not refer to a biological distinction or gender roles, but rather two modes of the failure of Symbolization. It is this failure which means that "there is no sexual rapport". See Woman is one of the Names-of-the-Father, or how Not to misread Lacan's formulas of sexuation for Zizek's position vis-à-vis sexuation.
POST-MODERNITY
For Zizek, present society, or post-modernity, is based upon the demise in the authority of the big Other. Continuing the theorists of the contemporary risk society, who advocate the personal freedoms of choice or reflexivity, which have replaced this authority, Zizek argues that these theorists ignore the reflexivity at the heart of the subject. For Zizek, lacking the prohibitions of the big Other, in these conditions, the subject's inherent reflexivity manifests itself in attachments to forms of subjection, paranoia and narcissism. In order to ameliorate these pathologies, Zizek proposes the need for a political act or revolution - one that will alter the conditions of possibility of post-modernity (which he identifies as capitalism) and so give birth to a new type of Symbolic Order in which a new breed of subject can exist.
The Law
Zizek refers to the law throughout his work. The term "the law" signifies the principles upon which society is based, designating a mode of collective conduct based upon a set of prohibitions. However, for Zizek, the rule of the law conceals an inherent unruliness which is precisely the violence by which it established itself as law in the first place.
"At the beginning" of the law, there is a certain "outlaw", a certain real of violence which coincides with the act itself of the establishment of the reign of the law... The illegitimate violence by which law sustains itself must be concealed at any price, because this concealment is the positive condition of the functioning of the law. (For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor)
The authority of the law stems not from some concept of justice, but because it is the law. Which is to say that the origin of the law can be found in the tautology: "the law is the law". If the law is to function properly, however, we must experience it as just. It is only when the law breaks down, when it becomes a law unto itself, and it reaches the limits of itself, do we glimpse those limits and acknowledge its contingency by reference to the phrase "the law is the law".
The Disintegration of the Big Other
One key aspect of the universalism of reflexivity is the resulting disintegration of the big Other, the communal network of social institutions, customs and laws. For Zizek, the big Other was always dead, in the sense that it never existed in the first place as a material thing. All it ever was (and is) is a purely symbolic order. It means that we all engage in a minimum of idealization, disavowing the brute fact of the Real in favor of another Symbolic world behind it. Zizek expresses this disavowal in terms of an "as if". In order to coexist with our neighbors we act "as if" they do not smell bad or look ridiculous.
The big Other is then a kind of collective lie to which we all individually subscribe. We all know that the emperor is naked (in the Real) but nonetheless we agree to the deception that he is wearing new clothes (in the Symbolic). When Zizek avers that "the big Other no longer exists" is that in the new postmodern era of reflexivity we no longer believe that the emperor is wearing clothes. We believe the testimony of our eyes (his nakedness in the Real) rather than the words of the big Other (his Symbolic new clothes). Instead of treating this as a case of punctuating hypocrisy, Zizek argues that "we get more than we bargained for - that the very community of which we were a member has disintegrated" (For They Know Not What They Do). There is a demise in "Symbolic efficiency".
Symbolic efficiency refers to the way in which for a fact to become true it is not enough for us just to know it, we need to know that the fact is also known by the big Other too. For Zizek, it is the big Other which confers an identity upon the many decenter-ed personalities of the contemporary subject. The different aspects of my personality do not claim an equal status in the Symbolic - it is only the Self or Selves registered by the big Other which display Symbolic efficiency, which are fully recognized by everyone else and determine my socio-economic position. The level at which this takes place is not that of "reality" as opposed to the play of my imagination - Lacan's point is not that, behind the multiplicity of phantasmagorical identities, there is a hard core of some "real Self", we are dealing with a symbolic fiction, but a fiction which, for contingent reasons that have nothing to do with its inherent structure, possesses per-formative power - is socially operative, structures the socio-symbolic reality in which I participate. The status of the same person, inclusive of his/her very "real" features, can appear in an entirely different light the moment the modality of his/her relationship to the big Other changes. (The Ticklish Subject: the Absent Center of Political Ideology)
The Return of the Big Other
Besides the construction of little big Others as a reaction of the demise of the big Other, Zizek identifies another response in the positing of a big Other that actually exists in the Real. The name Lacan gives to an Other in the Real is "the Other of the Other". A belief in an Other of the Other, in someone or something who is really pulling the strings of society and organizing everything, is one of the signs of paranoia. Needless to say that it is commonplace to argue that the dominant pathology today is paranoia: countless books and films refer to some organization which covertly control governments, news, markets and academia. Zizek proposes that the cause of this paranoia can be located in a reaction to the demise of the big Other:
When faced with such a paranoid construction, we must not forget Freud's warning and mistake it for the "illness" itself: the paranoid construction is, on the contrary, an attempt to heal ourselves, to pull ourselves out of the real "illness", the "end of the world", the breakdown of the symbolic universe, by means of this substitute formation. Looking Awry: an Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture)
Paradoxically, then, Zizek argues that the typical postmodern subject is one who displays an outright cynicism towards official institutions, yet at the same time believes in the existence of conspiracies and an unseen Other pulling the strings. This apparently contradictory coupling of cynicism and belief is strictly correlative to the demise of the big Other. Its disappearance causes us to construct an Other of the Other in order to escape the unbearable freedom its loss encumbers us with. Conversely, there is no need to take the big Other seriously if we believe in an Other of the Other. We therefore display cynicism and belief in equal and sincere measures.
Postmodernism: An Over-Proximity to the Real
One of the ways in which Zizek's understanding of the postmodern can be characterized is as an over-proximity of the Real. In postmodern art (or postmodernism) Zizek identifies various manifestations of this, such as the technique of "filling in the gaps". What Zizek means by this can be seen in his comparative analysis of The Talented Mr. Ripley (book and film). In Patricia Highsmith's novel, Ripley's homosexuality is only indirectly proposed, but in Anthony Minghella's film Ripley is openly gay. The repressed content of the novel, the absence around which it centers, is filled in. For Zizek, what we lose by covering over the void in this way is the void of subjectivity:
By way of "filling in the gaps" and "telling it all", what we retreat from is the void as such, which is ultimately none other than the void of subjectivity (the Lacanian "barred subject"). What Minghella accomplishes is the move from the void of subjectivity to the inner wealth of personality. (The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-Theory)
In Highsmith's novel the status of Ripley's sexuality is. at most, equivocal. As such, the book remains "innocent" in the eyes of the big Other because it does not openly transgress one of its norms. While we can interpret the clues in the story as indicating Ripley homosexuality, we do not have to do so. The film, on the other hand, "shows it all", Ripley is here objectively homosexual. So whereas in one instance the reader can decide subjectively whether or not Ripley is gay, the film allows no such room for man-oeuvre and the viewer is forced to accept Minghella's reading of the text.
IDEOLOGY
For Zizek, we are not so much living in a post-ideological era as in an era dominated by the ideology of cynicism. Adapting from Marx and Sloterdijk, he sums up the cynical attitude as "they know that, in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still, they are doing it". Ideology in this sense, is located in what we do and not in what we know. Our belief in an ideology is thus staged in advance of our acknowledging that belief in "belief machines", such as Althusser's Ideological State Apparatuses. It is "belief before belief."
Pinning Down Ideology with Points de Capiton
One of the questions Zizek asks about ideology is: what keeps an ideological field of meaning consistent? Given that signifiers are unstable and liable to slippages of meaning, how does an ideology maintain its consistency? The answer to this problem is that any given ideological field is "quilted" by what, following Lacan, he terms a point de capiton (literally an "upholstery button" though is has also been translated as "anchoring point"). In the same way that an upholstery button pins down stuffing inside a quilt and stops it from moving about, Zisek argues that a point de capiton is a signifier which stops meaning from sliding about inside the ideological quilt. A point de capiton unifies an ideological field and provides it with an identity. Freedom, i.e, is in itself an open-ended word, the meaning of which can slide about depending on the context of its use. A right-wing interpretation of the word might use it to designate the freedom to speculate on the market, whereas a left-wing interpretation of it might use it designate freedom from the inequalities of the market. The word "freedom" therefore does not mean the same thing in all possible worlds: what pins its meaning down is the point de capiton of "right-wing" or "left-wing". What is at issue in a conflict of ideologies is precisely the point de capiton - which signifier ("communism", "fascism", "capitalism", "market economy" and so on) will be entitled to quilt the ideological field ("freedom", "democracy", Human rights" and son on).
The Two Deaths
The fact that for Zizek the apparently all-inclusive whole of life and death are supplemented, by both a living death and a deathly life, points to the way in which we can die not just once, but twice. Most obviously, we will suffer a biological death in which our bodies will fail and eventually disintegrate. This is death in the Real, involving the obliteration of our material selves. But we can also suffer a Symbolic death. This does not involve the annihilation of our actual bodies, rather it entails the destruction of our Symbolic universe and the extermination of our subject positions. We can thus suffer a living death where we are excluded from the Symbolic and no longer exist for the Other. This might happen if we go mad or if we commit an atrocious crime and society disowns us. In this scenario, we still exist in the Real but not in the Symbolic. Alternatively, we might endure a deathly life or more a kind of life after death. This might happen if, after our bodies have died, people remember our names, remember our deeds and so on. In this case, we continue to exist in the Symbolic even though we have died in the Real.
The gap between the two deaths, Zizek argues, can be filled either by manifestations of the monstrous or the beautiful. In Shakespeare's Hamlet for example, Hamlet's father is dead in the Real, however, he persists as a terrifying and monstrous apparition because he was murdered and thereby cheated of the chance to settle his Symbolic debts. Once that debt has been repaid, following Hamlet's killing of his murderer, he is "completely" dead. In Sophocles' Antigone, the heroine suffers a Symbolic death before her Real death when she is excluded from the community for wanting to bury his traitorous brother. This destruction of her social identity instills her character with a sublime beauty. Ironically Antigone enters the domain between the two deaths "precisely in order to prevent her brother's second death: to give him a proper funeral that will secure his eternalization" (The Ticklish Subject: the Absent Center of Political Ontology). That is, she endures a Symbolic death in order that her brother, who has been refused proper burial rites, will not suffer a Symbolic death himself.
The Specter of Ideology
Zizek distinguishes three moments in the narrative of an ideology.
1. Doctrine - ideological doctrine concerns the ideas and theories of an ideology, i.e. liberalism partly developed from the ideas of John Locke.
2. Belief - ideological belief designates the material or external manifestations and apparatuses of its doctrine, i.e. liberalism is materialized in an independent press, democratic elections and the free market.
3. Ritual - ideological ritual refers to the internalization of a doctrine, the way it is experienced as spontaneous, i.e in liberalism subjects naturally think of themselves as free individuals.
These three aspects of ideology form a kind of narrative. In the first stage of ideological doctrine we find ideology in its "pure" state. Here ideology takes the form of a supposedly truthful proposition or set of arguments which, in reality, conceal a vested interest. Locke's arguments about government served the interest of the revolutionary Americans rather than the colonizing British. In a second step, a successful ideology takes on the material form which generates belief in that ideology, most potently in the guise of Althusser's State Apparatuses. Third, ideology assumes an almost spontaneous existence, becoming instinctive rather than realized either as an explicit set of arguments or as an institution. the supreme example of such spontaneity is, for Zizek, the notion of commodity fetishism.
In each of these three moments - a doctrine, its materialization in the form of belief and its manifestation as spontaneous ritual - as soon as we think we have assumed a position of truth from which to denounce the lie of an ideology, we find ourselves back in ideology again. This is so because our understanding of ideology is based on a binary structure, which contrasts reality with ideology. To solve this problem, Zizek suggests that we analyze ideology using a ternary structure. So, how can we distinguish reality from ideology? From what position, for example, is Zizek able to denounce the New Age reading of the universe as ideological mystification? It is not from the position in reality because reality is constituted by the Symbolic and the Symbolic is where fiction assumes the guise of truth. The only non-ideological position available is in the Real - the Real of the antagonism. Now, that is not a position we can actually occupy; it is rather "the extra-ideological point of reference that authorizes us to denounce the content of our immediate experience as 'ideological.'" (Mapping Ideology) The antagonism of the Real is a constant that has to be assumed given the existence of social reality (the Symbolic Order). As this antagonism is part of the Real, it is not subject to ideological mystification; rather its effect is visible in ideological mystification. Here, ideology takes the form of the spectral supplement to reality, concealing the gap opened up by the failure of reality (the Symbolic) to account fully for the Real. While this model of the structure of reality does not allow us a position from which to assume an objective viewpoint, it does presuppose the existence of ideology and thus authorizes the validity of its critique. The distinction between reality and ideology exists as a theoretical given. Zizek does not claim that he can offer any access to the "objective truth of things" but that ideology must be assumed to exist if we grant that reality is structured upon a constitutive antagonism. And if ideology exists we must be able to subject it to critique. This is the aim of Zizek's theory of ideology, namely an attempt to keep the project of ideological critique alive at all in an era in which we are said to have left ideology behind.
RACISM AND FANTASY
Fantasy as a Mask of the Inconsistency in the Big Other
One way at looking at the relationship between fantasy and the big Other is to think of fantasy as concealing the inconsistency of the Symbolic Order. To understand this we need to know why the big Other is inconsistent or structured around a gap. The answer to this question is that when the body enters the field of signification or the big Other, it is castrated. What Zizek means by this is that the price we pay for our admission to the universal medium of language is the loss of our full body selves. When we submit to the big Other we sacrifice direct access to our bodies and, instead, are condemned to an indirect relation with it via the medium of language. So, whereas, before we enter language we are what Zizek terms "pathological" subjects (the subject he notates by S), after we are immersed in language we are what he refers to as "barred" subjects (the empty subject he notates with $). What is barred from the barred subject is precisely the body as the materialization or incarnation of enjoyment (jouissance). Material jouissance is strictly at odds with, or heterogeneous to, the immaterial order of the signifier.
For the subject to enter the Symbolic Order, then, the Real of jouissance or enjoyment has to be evacuated from it. Which is another way to saying that the advent of the symbol entails "the murder of the thing". Although not all jouissance is completely evacuated by the process of signification (some of it persists in what are called the erogenous zones), most of it is not Symbolized. And this entails that the Symbolic Order cannot fully account for jouissance - it is what us missing in the big Other. The big Other is therefore inconsistent or structured around a lack, the lack of jouissance. It is, we might say, castrated or rendered incomplete by admitting the subject, in much the same way as the subject is castrated by its admission.
What fantasy does is conceal this lack or in-completion. So, as we saw previously when alluding to the formulas of sexuation, "there is not sexual relationship" in the big Other. What the fantasy of a sexual scenario thereby conceals is the impossibility of this sexual relationship. It covers up the lack in the big Other, the missing jouissance. In this regard, Zizek often avers that fantasy is a way for subjects to organize their jouissance - it is a way to manage or domesticate the traumatic loss of the jouissance which cannot be Symbolized.
The Window of Fantasy
For Zizek, racism is produced by a clash of fantasies rather than by a clash of symbols vying for supremacy. There are several distinguishing features of fantasy:
1. Fantasies are produced as a defense against the desire of the Other manifest in "What do you want from me?" - which is what the Other, in its inconsistency, really wants from me.
2. Fantasies provide a framework through which we see reality. They are anamorphic in that they presuppose a point of view, denying us an objective account of the world.
3. Fantasies are the one unique thing about us. They are what make us individuals, allowing a subjective view of reality. As such, our fantasies are extremely sensitive to the intrusion of others.
4. Fantasies are the way in which we organize and domesticate our jouissance.
Postmodern Racism
Zizek contends that today's racism is just as reflexive as every other part of postmodern life. It is not the product of ignorance in the way it used to be. So, whereas racism used to involve a claim that another ethnic group is inherently inferior to our own, racism is now articulated in terms of a respect for another culture. Instead of "My culture is better than yours", postmodern or reflexive racism will argue that "My culture is different from yours". As an example of this Zizek asks "was not the official argument for apartheid in the old South Africa that black culture should be preserved in its uniqueness, not dissipated in the Western melting-pot? (The Fragile Absolute, or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For) For him, what is at stake here is the fetishistic disavowal of cynicism: "I know very well that all ethnic cultures are equal in value, yet, nevertheless, I will act as if mine is superior". The split here between the subject of enunciated ("I know very well...") and the subject of the enunciation ("...nevertheless I act as if I didn't") is even preserved when racists are asked to explain the reasons for their behavior. A racist will blame his socio-economic environment, poor childhood, peer group pressure, and so on, in such a way as to suggest to Zizek that he cannot help being racist, but is merely a victim of circumstances. Thus postmodern racists are fully able to rationalize their behavior in a way that belies the traditional image of racism as the vocation of the ignorant.
The Ethnic Fantasy
If "ethnic tension" is a conflict of fantasies, what is then the racist fantasy? For Zizek there are two basic racist fantasies. The first type centers around the apprehension that the "ethnic other" desires our jouissance. "They" want to steal our enjoyment from "us" and rob us of the specificity of our fantasy. The second type proceeds from an uneasiness that the "ethnic other" has access to some strange jouissance. "They" do not things like "us". The way :they" enjoy themselves is alien and unfamiliar. What both these fantasies are predicated upon is that the "other" enjoys in a different way than "us":
In short, what really gets on our nerves, what really bothers us about the "other", is the peculiar way he organizes his jouissance (the smell of his food, his noisy songs and dances, his strange manners, his attitude to work - in the racist perspective, the "other" is either a workaholic stealing our jobs or an idler living on our labor. ( Looking Awry: an Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture)
So ethnic tension is caused by a conflict of fantasies if we regard fantasy as a way of organizing jouissance. The specificity of "their: fantasy conflicts with the specificity of "our" fantasy".
For Zizek, the perception of a threat, by "them" as well as by "us", remains strong. The last two decades have witnessed a marked rise in racial tension and ethnic nationalism. Following Lacan and Marx, Zizek ascribes this rise to the process of globalization. This process refers to the way in which capitalism has spread across the world. displacing local companies in favor of multinational ones. The effects of this process are nor necessarily just commercial, for what is at stake are the national cultures and politics bodies which underpin, and are supported by, resident industries. When McDonald's opens up in Bombay, for example, it is not just another business, but represents a specifically American approach to food, culture and social organization. The more capitalism spreads, the more it works to dissolve the efficacy of national domains, dissipating local traditions and values in favor of universal ones.
The only way to offset this increased homogeneity and to assert the worth of the particular against the global is to cling to our specific ethnic fantasy, the point of view which makes us Indians, British or Germans. And if we try to avoid being dissolved in the multicultural mix of globalization by sticking to the way we organize jouissance, we will court the risk of succumbing to a racist paranoia. Even if we attempt to institute a form of equality between the ways in which we aorganize enjoyment, unfortunately, as Zizek points out, "fantasies cannot coexist peacefully" (Looking Awry)
The Ethics of Fantasy
For Zizek is the state that should act as a buffer between the fantasies of different groups, mitigating the worst effects of those fantasies. If civil society were allowed to rule unrestrained, much of the world would succumb to racist violence. It is only the forces of the state which keep it in check.
In the long term, Zizek argues that in order to avoid a clash of fantasies we have to learn to "traverse the fantasy" (what Lacan terms "traversing the phantôme). It means that we have to acknowledge that fantasy merely functions to screen the abyss or inconsistency in the Other. In "traversing" or "going through" the fantasy "all we have to do is experience how there is nothing 'behind' it, and how fantasy masks precisely this 'nothing'". (The Sublime Object of Ideology)
The subject of racism, be it a Jew, a Muslim, a Latino, an African-American, gay or lesbian, Chinese, is a fantasy figure, someone who embodies the void of the Other. The underlying argument of all racism is that "if only they weren't here, it would be perfect, and society will be harmonious again". However, what this argument misses is the fact that because the subject of racism is only a fantasy figure, it is only there to make us think that such a harmonious society is actually possible. In reality, society is always-already divided. The fantasy racist figure is just a way of covering up the impossibility of a whole society or an organic Symbolic Order complete unto itself:
What appears as the hindrance to society's full identity with itself is actually its positive condition: by transposing onto the Jew the role of the foreign body which introduces in the social organism disintegration and antagonism, the fantasy-image of society qua consistent, harmonious whole is rendered possible. (Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out)
Which is another way of saying that if the Jew qua fantasy figure was not there, we would have to invent it so as to maintain the illusion that we could have a perfect society. For all the fantasy figure does is to embody the existing impossibility of a complete society.
My position is that Zizek is a difficult person to comprehend given the cosmology of the thinking and the need to be an observer to truly follow the train of history.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Monday, November 23, 2009
SQ, IQ & EQ rationalism in the cloud of unknowing
by Cherian P. Tekkeveettil http://www.lifepositive.com/mind/evolution/iq-genius/intelligence.asp
IQ and EQ give way to spiritual intelligence, the ultimate intelligence that can add value and meaning to your life
EIGHT SIGNS OF HIGH SQ
1.Flexibility
2. Self-awareness
3. An ability to face and use suffering
4. The ability to be inspired by a vision
5. An ability to see connections between diverse things (thinking holistically)
6. A desire and capacity to cause as little harm as possible
7. A tendency to probe and ask fundamental questions
8. An ability to work against convention
SEVEN TYPES OF INTELLIGENCE
With the popularity of EQ and SQ in recent years, it might be worth remembering an older way of conceiving intelligence, which helps cultivate individual aspects of ourselves. This is Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligence. In 1984, in his book Frames of Mind—The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, he offered a critique of IQ testing and suggested that what we possess is not one 'intelligence' but seven different intelligences. These are: logical-mathematical, linguistic, musical, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal and spatial.
Intelligence Type: How To Develop It:
Logical-Mathematical Intelligence
This is what we use to manipulate concepts and arrange them into meaningful patterns. We develop this by constantly confronting objects, assessing them and reordering them.
1. Learn a computer language
2. Work on logic puzzles
3. Identify scientific principles around the house: pumps, bulbs etc.
Linguistic Intelligence
This is the intelligence that gives us sensitivity to language, an ability to absorb and manipulate it skillfully and to be aware of shades of meaning.
1. Take a writing class
2. Record yourself speaking into a tape-recorder
3. Memorize passages of poetry
Musical Intelligence
This gives us our sensitivity to sound, our ability to arrange sounds into patterns pleasing to the human ear.
1. Sing in the shower
2. Memorize tunes
3. Spend time listening to music everyday
Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence
This is the intelligence that gives us the ability to perform tasks of great discipline and commitment with our bodies. Dancers, athletes and martial arts practitioners have this.
1. Take up martial arts like tai chi or karate
2. Take up a sport
3. Learn a craft such as woodworking,basket-weaving, pottery-making or crochet
Interpersonal Intelligence
This gives us the ability to relate skillfully with others, to be aware of our feelings and the other person's, to see where the other person is coming from.
1. Decide to meet one new person a week and stay in touch, start a blog.
2. Join an NGO
3. Spend 15 minutes a day listening actively to a friend.
Intrapersonal Intelligence
This is about becoming truly aware of ourselves and having the ability to constantly purify ourselves in order to access higher levels of joy and power.
1. Do a vipassana course, hatha yoga, or breathing with meditation and make it a part of your life
2. Spend time with yourself everyday, just being quiet
3. Read biographies of people with powerful personalities
Spatial Intelligence
This form of intelligence calls upon our ability to create a mental image. It gives us the capacity to perceive the visual world accurately and to perform transformations and modifications upon our initial perceptions. Artists, designers and architects have this intelligence.
1. Take classes in painting, sculpture or photography
2. Buy a graphics software program and create designs on the computer
3. Watch films with attention to lighting, camera angles, color and other aspects of cinema.
For long, the world gave much importance to Intelligence Quotient. "My son has an IQ of 210!" the proud mother would gush. "He's going to be a scientist." This attitude is a legacy of the early 20th century when psychologists devised tests to measure intelligence. These tests primarily measured intellectual or rational intelligence (used to solve logical problems). The higher the figure, the belief went, the greater the intelligence.
In mid-1990s, Daniel Goleman revealed findings in neuroscience and psychology that stressed the importance of Emotional Quotient (EQ). This makes us aware of our feelings and that of others. It gives empathy, motivation, compassion and an ability to respond skillfully to pleasure and pain. Goleman argued that EQ was a basic requirement for the use of IQ. If the areas of our brain that feel are damaged, our ability to think effectively is diminished.
Last year, however, authors Dana Zohar and Ian Marshall introduced a new dimension to human intelligence. Spiritual Quotient (or SQ) is the ultimate intelligence, they claim. This is the intelligence used to solve problems of meaning and value. "Is my job giving me the fulfillment I seek?" "Am I relating to the people in my life in a way that contributes to their happiness and mine?" Answers to these questions determine whether we will find happiness or not. IQ and EQ are inadequate in such issues. "Spiritual intelligence," explains Ram Mohan, a Vedanta teacher, "is about the growth of a human being. It is about moving on in life. About having a direction in life and being able to heal ourselves of all the resentment we carry. It is thinking of ourselves as an expression of a higher reality. It is also about how we look at the resources available to us. We realize that nature is not meant to be exploited. Ultimately, we discover freedom from our sense of limitation as human beings and attain moksha."
Anand Tendolkar, a workshop leader, says: "For me spiritual intelligence is about pondering over my life's purpose. Just being in touch with that question is fulfilling. Finally I realize that there is an immensity to me. As I move along the path, deeper levels of myself get unfolded, leading to fulfillment."
Humans are essentially spiritual beings, evolved to ask fundamental questions. "Who am I?" "Where am I going?" "What do others mean to me?" It is an ability to answer questions like these that lead people to personal growth workshops. Spiritual intelligence motivates people to balance their work schedules to spend time with the family. Or an executive with a high SQ might look beyond profit margins and devote time for voluntary work with orphans. Spiritual intelligence also addresses the need to place one's life in a shared context of value.
The transformative power of SQ distinguishes it from IQ and EQ. IQ primarily solves logical problems. EQ allows us to judge the situation we are in and behave appropriately. SQ allows us to ask if we want to be in that situation in the first place. It might motivate us to create a new one. SQ has little connection to formal religion. Atheists and humanists may have high SQ while someone actively religious may not.
"The awakening of our spiritual intelligence may be a time of great joy and meaning," says Anita Pandey, who frequents personal growth programs. "Suddenly I had a feeling of being in control. Earlier things happened to me. Now I am more aware. Also, I have actually started living those values I had heard about—like acceptance and unconditional love."
In their book Spiritual Intelligence—The Ultimate Intelligence, Zohar and Marshall discuss the scientific evidence for SQ. In the 1990s, research by neuropsychologist Michael Persinger and neurologist V.S. Ramachandran at the University of California led to an identification of a 'God-spot' in the human brain. This area is located among neural connections in the temporal lobes of the brain. During scans with positron emission topography, these neural areas light up whenever research subjects are exposed to discussion of spiritual topics. Of course, this is culture specific, with Westerners responding to ideas of 'God' and Buddhists and Hindus responding to certain symbols. While the God-spot does not prove the existence of 'God', it does indicate that the brain is programmed to ask ultimate questions.
We use spiritual intelligence to transform ourselves and others, heal relationship, cope with grief, and move beyond conditioned habits of the past. To develop high SQ, each person needs to approach the task according to his/her personality.
J.L. Holland divided people into six personality types (take the test) and devised tests to determine one's type, or the mix.
On each personality test we would have scored between zero and 12. This indicates the strength of our interest in that sector of life. An average adult will score 6 or more on perhaps three of the personality types. For example, we might score highest (say nine) on the artistic type, but score seven on the enterprising type and six on the investigative. Naturally, we must allow for some degree of overlap between the different types.
Once we know our personality type, we can better choose our particular path to higher SQ.
KISMAT vs DHARMA
CONVENTIONAL TYPE: THE PATH OF DUTY
We follow this path by serving the community. This is done by realizing our life's purpose and following it with full commitment. We have the interest of humanity in mind and pursue what we truly love for others' sake. Many of us may want to associate ourselves with a specific organization to fulfill this ambition.
Whatever outlet we choose, we must avoid two common mistakes that people on this path make. Avoid becoming narcissistic. It is an easy trap to slip into. At one point we may withdraw completely from relationships and focus only on ourselves. Behaviors associated with such self-absorption include lying in bed late, heavy drinking and smoking and overindulgence in food and sex. A narcissist must address his problems adequately through therapy or spiritual practices before he can progress on the path of duty.
Avoid extreme identification with your group and its uncritical championing. We must realize that there is a place in the world for groups whose values differ from ours.
SOCIAL TYPE: THE PATH OF NURTURING
This path is about loving, nurturing and protecting. It corresponds to the Mother Goddess. People on this path include parents, teachers, nurses and therapists, who reach out to others with acceptance and compassion and provide them with the space to grow and find themselves.
To pursue this path, the right attitude is crucial. "How can I serve others when I myself need so much from others?" explains Ram Mohan. "For example, I live in a city where many of the things I consume—like food and medicines—are not produced. I need the efforts of so many people to make life possible. I realize that I am only making my talents available to people in return for things I am receiving. When I look at it this way, it helps me face the many disappointments I may encounter."
It is important to be mindful of the way we help others. A distorted way is to succumb to the shadow aspect of love and nurturing, which is hatred and revenge. Love can be patient and kind but when we do not truly love ourselves, our love for others becomes bitter and destructive.
Another common failing is to suffocate the person we seek to love. We have to give the person space to grow. To pursue this path effectively, we must be receptive and listen to the other person. We must be willing to reveal ourselves to others. A risk-free approach is unlikely to succeed.
When we meet great teachers, one striking thing about them is their ability to truly be there for another person. Such attention and empathy is rare. To pursue this path, we must model ourselves on a teacher or mentor who has already clarified his life before reaching out to others.
INVESTIGATIVE TYPE: THE PATH OF KNOWLEDGE
The path of knowledge covers a broad range of experience. It could be something as simple as solving everyday problems. Or, as vast as pursuing a spiritual path. Most people on this path are scholars, scientists or those who have an intense love of learning.
How we pursue this path can have profound benefits for mankind. One can engage in research that solves problems plaguing mankind. For instance, a scientist could devise a cheap fuel that is eco-friendly.
While the potential of this path is limitless, we must clarify our intention in pursuing it.
We must realize that all things are interconnected and we cannot apply our knowledge to one area of experience without having profound effects on others.
Nandan Savnal, Mumbai-based NLP trainer, alerts us to another crucial aspect: "One of the most important challenges on this path," he says, "is whether you are going to be honest with yourself and question things. When you investigate matters, your value system will be challenged. You will have to press on regardless. You cannot afford to operate from your comfort zone."
Another spiritually unintelligent way to walk this path that must be avoided is using our talent to support morally reprehensible work. Like the historians who deny the Holocaust or those who devote themselves to spreading racist propaganda.
ARTISTIC TYPE: THE PATH OF PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION
Writers, artists, musicians and their like constitute only 10 to 15 percent of the population. But most of us walk this path to some extent. The task facing such people is personal and transpersonal integration. We must explore the depths of ourselves and weld the disparate fragments into a harmonious whole.
The path most closely associated with the brain's God-spot activity, people here are most open to extreme emotions and eccentric behavior. For this reason, artists are most often thought of as society's healers (or shamans). They journey into the unknown and return with a fragment that can heal us all. This is the process that has created some of the world's greatest art.
Cultures throughout history have treated the artist as someone blessed with special vision. Indeed, their capacity to create societal awareness is profound. Consider the great saint-poets like Rumi and Kabir.
For Savnal, engaging with great stories from different traditions has been therapeutic. "When I was young," he says, "I was fascinated by the story about Bhima in which he has a wrestling match and jumps up with the strength of ten elephants every time he is knocked down. With time, I realized that the suggestion is to bounce back with greater energy every time you face a setback."
We must watch out for certain traps, however. One is becoming an aesthete—people concerned with form only who produce art purely for sensual gratification. Their goal is acquisition and display. Another common failing is to be a compulsive, permanent rebel. Such people will resist order and imagination in their art, fight committed relationships and even miss deadlines.
The extremes described above are a turning away from conflict. But when an artist embraces his conflict he can claim his spiritual intelligence and produce art of lasting value.
REALISTIC PERSON: THE PATH OF BROTHERHOOD
Priti Sen is a caring middle-aged mother and a devoted wife. Her husband is a rich, influential businessman. She loves socializing and also does charity work. Seemingly strong, cheerful and in charge of her life, the truth about her is not immediately obvious. Her teenage son lost both his legs in an accident. While her shattered husband and other children cry almost daily, Priti is quiet, sensible and calm. She busies herself caring for her son, building a new life for him. Her ability to accept adversity is a source of strength to her family.
Priti exemplifies the attributes of the realistic type. Practical, no-nonsense, uncomfortable with overt feelings, these people personify the virtues of the hero. Their mission in life is to pursue the path of brotherhood and justice. It is to see a connection between themselves and all other beings. A Buddhist sutra describes this: "In the heaven of Indra (the king of the gods in the Hindu pantheon) there is a network of pearls so arranged that if you look at one, you see all the others reflected in it. In the same way, each object in the world is not merely itself, but involves every other object and in fact is every other object."
Those who have internalized this precept form organizations that bring justice into the world. They decide how rights and goods are distributed for the benefit of all. This involves respect for the other's point of view. When such people work together in NGOs or spiritual organizations, they grow toward a deeper understanding that all people are players in a larger pattern.
ENTERPRISING TYPE: THE PATH OF SERVANT-LEADERSHIP
All human groupings, families, tribes and societies need leaders to impart vision, motivation and purpose. Effective leaders must be confident, outgoing and comfortable with power. Truly great leaders are servant-leaders-those who serve humanity by creating new ways for people to relate to each other. They put the good of society above their own good and take society in new directions. Buddha and Jesus were such leaders. In India, we had Emperor Ashoka who, after his brutal conquest of Kalinga, converted to Buddhism and embraced nonviolence. And environmentalists like Sunderlal Bahuguna and Medha Patkar have forced people to look afresh at ecological issues.
It must be stressed, however, that a servant-leader should have a great deal of inner clarity. A spiritually unintelligent way to walk this path is to use one's power to exploit others. Another mistake is to focus purely on one's petty needs and ignore the interests of the people we serve.
"The challenge is to have a vision," says Ram Mohan. "After that, the task is to build trust and empower people to give their best." It is essential to do this ethically. In a corrupt society, there will be pressures on us and we must know how to handle it. To retain his balance, a leader would do well to think about trusteeship. Gandhi declared that when an individual has more than his proportionate share of wealth, he should become a trustee of that portion on God's behalf.
It is to this noble vision of leadership that one must aspire. In an increasingly fragmented world, we need leaders of vision who can bring hope and purpose into the lives of others, someone who sees all of humanity as God's people. As Jesus said: "Not my will, Lord, but thine."
The outline of the above paths is meant to help those who wish to develop their spiritual intelligence and gain a better awareness of themselves. To this awareness must be added the invaluable ingredient of hard work. But thinking of ourselves as spiritual beings is a useful start. Once we do this, we can enlarge our idea of intelligence to include this greater vision of ourselves.
When we commit ourselves to the chosen paths in this light, we begin to imbue greater meaning, value and fulfillment in our lives. At the end is the beginning thought of recognizing the goodness and God presence in all that we are aware within and without , the eternal is us and we are eternal.
IQ and EQ give way to spiritual intelligence, the ultimate intelligence that can add value and meaning to your life
EIGHT SIGNS OF HIGH SQ
1.Flexibility
2. Self-awareness
3. An ability to face and use suffering
4. The ability to be inspired by a vision
5. An ability to see connections between diverse things (thinking holistically)
6. A desire and capacity to cause as little harm as possible
7. A tendency to probe and ask fundamental questions
8. An ability to work against convention
SEVEN TYPES OF INTELLIGENCE
With the popularity of EQ and SQ in recent years, it might be worth remembering an older way of conceiving intelligence, which helps cultivate individual aspects of ourselves. This is Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligence. In 1984, in his book Frames of Mind—The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, he offered a critique of IQ testing and suggested that what we possess is not one 'intelligence' but seven different intelligences. These are: logical-mathematical, linguistic, musical, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal and spatial.
Intelligence Type: How To Develop It:
Logical-Mathematical Intelligence
This is what we use to manipulate concepts and arrange them into meaningful patterns. We develop this by constantly confronting objects, assessing them and reordering them.
1. Learn a computer language
2. Work on logic puzzles
3. Identify scientific principles around the house: pumps, bulbs etc.
Linguistic Intelligence
This is the intelligence that gives us sensitivity to language, an ability to absorb and manipulate it skillfully and to be aware of shades of meaning.
1. Take a writing class
2. Record yourself speaking into a tape-recorder
3. Memorize passages of poetry
Musical Intelligence
This gives us our sensitivity to sound, our ability to arrange sounds into patterns pleasing to the human ear.
1. Sing in the shower
2. Memorize tunes
3. Spend time listening to music everyday
Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence
This is the intelligence that gives us the ability to perform tasks of great discipline and commitment with our bodies. Dancers, athletes and martial arts practitioners have this.
1. Take up martial arts like tai chi or karate
2. Take up a sport
3. Learn a craft such as woodworking,basket-weaving, pottery-making or crochet
Interpersonal Intelligence
This gives us the ability to relate skillfully with others, to be aware of our feelings and the other person's, to see where the other person is coming from.
1. Decide to meet one new person a week and stay in touch, start a blog.
2. Join an NGO
3. Spend 15 minutes a day listening actively to a friend.
Intrapersonal Intelligence
This is about becoming truly aware of ourselves and having the ability to constantly purify ourselves in order to access higher levels of joy and power.
1. Do a vipassana course, hatha yoga, or breathing with meditation and make it a part of your life
2. Spend time with yourself everyday, just being quiet
3. Read biographies of people with powerful personalities
Spatial Intelligence
This form of intelligence calls upon our ability to create a mental image. It gives us the capacity to perceive the visual world accurately and to perform transformations and modifications upon our initial perceptions. Artists, designers and architects have this intelligence.
1. Take classes in painting, sculpture or photography
2. Buy a graphics software program and create designs on the computer
3. Watch films with attention to lighting, camera angles, color and other aspects of cinema.
For long, the world gave much importance to Intelligence Quotient. "My son has an IQ of 210!" the proud mother would gush. "He's going to be a scientist." This attitude is a legacy of the early 20th century when psychologists devised tests to measure intelligence. These tests primarily measured intellectual or rational intelligence (used to solve logical problems). The higher the figure, the belief went, the greater the intelligence.
In mid-1990s, Daniel Goleman revealed findings in neuroscience and psychology that stressed the importance of Emotional Quotient (EQ). This makes us aware of our feelings and that of others. It gives empathy, motivation, compassion and an ability to respond skillfully to pleasure and pain. Goleman argued that EQ was a basic requirement for the use of IQ. If the areas of our brain that feel are damaged, our ability to think effectively is diminished.
Last year, however, authors Dana Zohar and Ian Marshall introduced a new dimension to human intelligence. Spiritual Quotient (or SQ) is the ultimate intelligence, they claim. This is the intelligence used to solve problems of meaning and value. "Is my job giving me the fulfillment I seek?" "Am I relating to the people in my life in a way that contributes to their happiness and mine?" Answers to these questions determine whether we will find happiness or not. IQ and EQ are inadequate in such issues. "Spiritual intelligence," explains Ram Mohan, a Vedanta teacher, "is about the growth of a human being. It is about moving on in life. About having a direction in life and being able to heal ourselves of all the resentment we carry. It is thinking of ourselves as an expression of a higher reality. It is also about how we look at the resources available to us. We realize that nature is not meant to be exploited. Ultimately, we discover freedom from our sense of limitation as human beings and attain moksha."
Anand Tendolkar, a workshop leader, says: "For me spiritual intelligence is about pondering over my life's purpose. Just being in touch with that question is fulfilling. Finally I realize that there is an immensity to me. As I move along the path, deeper levels of myself get unfolded, leading to fulfillment."
Humans are essentially spiritual beings, evolved to ask fundamental questions. "Who am I?" "Where am I going?" "What do others mean to me?" It is an ability to answer questions like these that lead people to personal growth workshops. Spiritual intelligence motivates people to balance their work schedules to spend time with the family. Or an executive with a high SQ might look beyond profit margins and devote time for voluntary work with orphans. Spiritual intelligence also addresses the need to place one's life in a shared context of value.
The transformative power of SQ distinguishes it from IQ and EQ. IQ primarily solves logical problems. EQ allows us to judge the situation we are in and behave appropriately. SQ allows us to ask if we want to be in that situation in the first place. It might motivate us to create a new one. SQ has little connection to formal religion. Atheists and humanists may have high SQ while someone actively religious may not.
"The awakening of our spiritual intelligence may be a time of great joy and meaning," says Anita Pandey, who frequents personal growth programs. "Suddenly I had a feeling of being in control. Earlier things happened to me. Now I am more aware. Also, I have actually started living those values I had heard about—like acceptance and unconditional love."
In their book Spiritual Intelligence—The Ultimate Intelligence, Zohar and Marshall discuss the scientific evidence for SQ. In the 1990s, research by neuropsychologist Michael Persinger and neurologist V.S. Ramachandran at the University of California led to an identification of a 'God-spot' in the human brain. This area is located among neural connections in the temporal lobes of the brain. During scans with positron emission topography, these neural areas light up whenever research subjects are exposed to discussion of spiritual topics. Of course, this is culture specific, with Westerners responding to ideas of 'God' and Buddhists and Hindus responding to certain symbols. While the God-spot does not prove the existence of 'God', it does indicate that the brain is programmed to ask ultimate questions.
We use spiritual intelligence to transform ourselves and others, heal relationship, cope with grief, and move beyond conditioned habits of the past. To develop high SQ, each person needs to approach the task according to his/her personality.
J.L. Holland divided people into six personality types (take the test) and devised tests to determine one's type, or the mix.
On each personality test we would have scored between zero and 12. This indicates the strength of our interest in that sector of life. An average adult will score 6 or more on perhaps three of the personality types. For example, we might score highest (say nine) on the artistic type, but score seven on the enterprising type and six on the investigative. Naturally, we must allow for some degree of overlap between the different types.
Once we know our personality type, we can better choose our particular path to higher SQ.
KISMAT vs DHARMA
CONVENTIONAL TYPE: THE PATH OF DUTY
We follow this path by serving the community. This is done by realizing our life's purpose and following it with full commitment. We have the interest of humanity in mind and pursue what we truly love for others' sake. Many of us may want to associate ourselves with a specific organization to fulfill this ambition.
Whatever outlet we choose, we must avoid two common mistakes that people on this path make. Avoid becoming narcissistic. It is an easy trap to slip into. At one point we may withdraw completely from relationships and focus only on ourselves. Behaviors associated with such self-absorption include lying in bed late, heavy drinking and smoking and overindulgence in food and sex. A narcissist must address his problems adequately through therapy or spiritual practices before he can progress on the path of duty.
Avoid extreme identification with your group and its uncritical championing. We must realize that there is a place in the world for groups whose values differ from ours.
SOCIAL TYPE: THE PATH OF NURTURING
This path is about loving, nurturing and protecting. It corresponds to the Mother Goddess. People on this path include parents, teachers, nurses and therapists, who reach out to others with acceptance and compassion and provide them with the space to grow and find themselves.
To pursue this path, the right attitude is crucial. "How can I serve others when I myself need so much from others?" explains Ram Mohan. "For example, I live in a city where many of the things I consume—like food and medicines—are not produced. I need the efforts of so many people to make life possible. I realize that I am only making my talents available to people in return for things I am receiving. When I look at it this way, it helps me face the many disappointments I may encounter."
It is important to be mindful of the way we help others. A distorted way is to succumb to the shadow aspect of love and nurturing, which is hatred and revenge. Love can be patient and kind but when we do not truly love ourselves, our love for others becomes bitter and destructive.
Another common failing is to suffocate the person we seek to love. We have to give the person space to grow. To pursue this path effectively, we must be receptive and listen to the other person. We must be willing to reveal ourselves to others. A risk-free approach is unlikely to succeed.
When we meet great teachers, one striking thing about them is their ability to truly be there for another person. Such attention and empathy is rare. To pursue this path, we must model ourselves on a teacher or mentor who has already clarified his life before reaching out to others.
INVESTIGATIVE TYPE: THE PATH OF KNOWLEDGE
The path of knowledge covers a broad range of experience. It could be something as simple as solving everyday problems. Or, as vast as pursuing a spiritual path. Most people on this path are scholars, scientists or those who have an intense love of learning.
How we pursue this path can have profound benefits for mankind. One can engage in research that solves problems plaguing mankind. For instance, a scientist could devise a cheap fuel that is eco-friendly.
While the potential of this path is limitless, we must clarify our intention in pursuing it.
We must realize that all things are interconnected and we cannot apply our knowledge to one area of experience without having profound effects on others.
Nandan Savnal, Mumbai-based NLP trainer, alerts us to another crucial aspect: "One of the most important challenges on this path," he says, "is whether you are going to be honest with yourself and question things. When you investigate matters, your value system will be challenged. You will have to press on regardless. You cannot afford to operate from your comfort zone."
Another spiritually unintelligent way to walk this path that must be avoided is using our talent to support morally reprehensible work. Like the historians who deny the Holocaust or those who devote themselves to spreading racist propaganda.
ARTISTIC TYPE: THE PATH OF PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION
Writers, artists, musicians and their like constitute only 10 to 15 percent of the population. But most of us walk this path to some extent. The task facing such people is personal and transpersonal integration. We must explore the depths of ourselves and weld the disparate fragments into a harmonious whole.
The path most closely associated with the brain's God-spot activity, people here are most open to extreme emotions and eccentric behavior. For this reason, artists are most often thought of as society's healers (or shamans). They journey into the unknown and return with a fragment that can heal us all. This is the process that has created some of the world's greatest art.
Cultures throughout history have treated the artist as someone blessed with special vision. Indeed, their capacity to create societal awareness is profound. Consider the great saint-poets like Rumi and Kabir.
For Savnal, engaging with great stories from different traditions has been therapeutic. "When I was young," he says, "I was fascinated by the story about Bhima in which he has a wrestling match and jumps up with the strength of ten elephants every time he is knocked down. With time, I realized that the suggestion is to bounce back with greater energy every time you face a setback."
We must watch out for certain traps, however. One is becoming an aesthete—people concerned with form only who produce art purely for sensual gratification. Their goal is acquisition and display. Another common failing is to be a compulsive, permanent rebel. Such people will resist order and imagination in their art, fight committed relationships and even miss deadlines.
The extremes described above are a turning away from conflict. But when an artist embraces his conflict he can claim his spiritual intelligence and produce art of lasting value.
REALISTIC PERSON: THE PATH OF BROTHERHOOD
Priti Sen is a caring middle-aged mother and a devoted wife. Her husband is a rich, influential businessman. She loves socializing and also does charity work. Seemingly strong, cheerful and in charge of her life, the truth about her is not immediately obvious. Her teenage son lost both his legs in an accident. While her shattered husband and other children cry almost daily, Priti is quiet, sensible and calm. She busies herself caring for her son, building a new life for him. Her ability to accept adversity is a source of strength to her family.
Priti exemplifies the attributes of the realistic type. Practical, no-nonsense, uncomfortable with overt feelings, these people personify the virtues of the hero. Their mission in life is to pursue the path of brotherhood and justice. It is to see a connection between themselves and all other beings. A Buddhist sutra describes this: "In the heaven of Indra (the king of the gods in the Hindu pantheon) there is a network of pearls so arranged that if you look at one, you see all the others reflected in it. In the same way, each object in the world is not merely itself, but involves every other object and in fact is every other object."
Those who have internalized this precept form organizations that bring justice into the world. They decide how rights and goods are distributed for the benefit of all. This involves respect for the other's point of view. When such people work together in NGOs or spiritual organizations, they grow toward a deeper understanding that all people are players in a larger pattern.
ENTERPRISING TYPE: THE PATH OF SERVANT-LEADERSHIP
All human groupings, families, tribes and societies need leaders to impart vision, motivation and purpose. Effective leaders must be confident, outgoing and comfortable with power. Truly great leaders are servant-leaders-those who serve humanity by creating new ways for people to relate to each other. They put the good of society above their own good and take society in new directions. Buddha and Jesus were such leaders. In India, we had Emperor Ashoka who, after his brutal conquest of Kalinga, converted to Buddhism and embraced nonviolence. And environmentalists like Sunderlal Bahuguna and Medha Patkar have forced people to look afresh at ecological issues.
It must be stressed, however, that a servant-leader should have a great deal of inner clarity. A spiritually unintelligent way to walk this path is to use one's power to exploit others. Another mistake is to focus purely on one's petty needs and ignore the interests of the people we serve.
"The challenge is to have a vision," says Ram Mohan. "After that, the task is to build trust and empower people to give their best." It is essential to do this ethically. In a corrupt society, there will be pressures on us and we must know how to handle it. To retain his balance, a leader would do well to think about trusteeship. Gandhi declared that when an individual has more than his proportionate share of wealth, he should become a trustee of that portion on God's behalf.
It is to this noble vision of leadership that one must aspire. In an increasingly fragmented world, we need leaders of vision who can bring hope and purpose into the lives of others, someone who sees all of humanity as God's people. As Jesus said: "Not my will, Lord, but thine."
The outline of the above paths is meant to help those who wish to develop their spiritual intelligence and gain a better awareness of themselves. To this awareness must be added the invaluable ingredient of hard work. But thinking of ourselves as spiritual beings is a useful start. Once we do this, we can enlarge our idea of intelligence to include this greater vision of ourselves.
When we commit ourselves to the chosen paths in this light, we begin to imbue greater meaning, value and fulfillment in our lives. At the end is the beginning thought of recognizing the goodness and God presence in all that we are aware within and without , the eternal is us and we are eternal.
Solution Ideas for Human Problems + Learning Talent + Thrifty Money= Sustainable Enterprise
Great ideas are themselves masqueraded as low copper coinage in the hands of the common until transmuted by the actions of an entrepreneur who has the vision to see the gold under the copper and is willing to risk and take dreaded action towards refining and purifying that great idea into a viable business concern. As Louis Pasteur summed up "Dans les champs de l'observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés".
Talking about an idea is the putting the seed into the ground , however the maturing to harvest is where the real skill and luck comes . Manufacturing a service or goods requires exceptional faith and fate that what you see is indeed what will be , where others see barrenness , loss and locust eaten dearth , you see a cornucopia of abundance goodness, with the eyes of Caleb and the courage of Joshua , the Nephilims in the land you are working on are but one more locked door that must be called upon either with key or battering ram , but open it shall for the entrepreneur.
Idea + Talent + Money= Enterprise is the only formula that creates and sustains business. Sadly in most instances the thinking and doing part of a company gets confused and mis-aligned and the money becomes the object rather than the enterprise. One solution is to infect your talent with a thoughtworm hungering for nourishing ideas , the other is to focus on the enterprise not the money by having every one in the workforce wear EVA spectacles for their failing eyesight, 20/20 in this talent pool is the mandatory minimum. What is the value contribution of this investment, expense or action I am undertaking , and am I doing what needs to be done well or am I doing well what is no longer relevant or required. Being consciousness of the law of selfishness proportional to title and office , means that great harm or good can disseminate from the managing director /ceo desk, as to which of the two depends whose hands are holding the scales of value.
As for organized labourforce /unions , to me in a confused and corrupted microcosm of a mis-managed legacy enterprise, one hopes that duty for continuance is the moral driving force , the need to exist for another day a powerful engine of doing and doing well,otherwise there will be extinction, contraction and sorrow in that workpool.
What is yours is also mine and what is mine is not yours attitude married to a dollar pay for 25 cents service entitlement mentality repeated by upper echelon office holders fosters an environment of culpability and calumny in the organizational culture that stains the performance effectiveness of collected effort of the team, the whole team. One solution is micromanage and effect transparency by flattening reporting and supervisory structures within the organization, giving access in an accurate and timely manner key information of the real health of the business to all platforms in that business regardless of rank or status. This means if I am a temporary laborer in a business and I want to know what the managing director is paying his chauffeur every month , I have access to this and the access is timely and the information given is accurate and verifiable.
Your thoughts are welcomed.
Talking about an idea is the putting the seed into the ground , however the maturing to harvest is where the real skill and luck comes . Manufacturing a service or goods requires exceptional faith and fate that what you see is indeed what will be , where others see barrenness , loss and locust eaten dearth , you see a cornucopia of abundance goodness, with the eyes of Caleb and the courage of Joshua , the Nephilims in the land you are working on are but one more locked door that must be called upon either with key or battering ram , but open it shall for the entrepreneur.
Idea + Talent + Money= Enterprise is the only formula that creates and sustains business. Sadly in most instances the thinking and doing part of a company gets confused and mis-aligned and the money becomes the object rather than the enterprise. One solution is to infect your talent with a thoughtworm hungering for nourishing ideas , the other is to focus on the enterprise not the money by having every one in the workforce wear EVA spectacles for their failing eyesight, 20/20 in this talent pool is the mandatory minimum. What is the value contribution of this investment, expense or action I am undertaking , and am I doing what needs to be done well or am I doing well what is no longer relevant or required. Being consciousness of the law of selfishness proportional to title and office , means that great harm or good can disseminate from the managing director /ceo desk, as to which of the two depends whose hands are holding the scales of value.
As for organized labourforce /unions , to me in a confused and corrupted microcosm of a mis-managed legacy enterprise, one hopes that duty for continuance is the moral driving force , the need to exist for another day a powerful engine of doing and doing well,otherwise there will be extinction, contraction and sorrow in that workpool.
What is yours is also mine and what is mine is not yours attitude married to a dollar pay for 25 cents service entitlement mentality repeated by upper echelon office holders fosters an environment of culpability and calumny in the organizational culture that stains the performance effectiveness of collected effort of the team, the whole team. One solution is micromanage and effect transparency by flattening reporting and supervisory structures within the organization, giving access in an accurate and timely manner key information of the real health of the business to all platforms in that business regardless of rank or status. This means if I am a temporary laborer in a business and I want to know what the managing director is paying his chauffeur every month , I have access to this and the access is timely and the information given is accurate and verifiable.
Your thoughts are welcomed.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
The confusing belief that the tree of knowledge is the tree of life
I have found in my middle passage of my life that the very few childish habits that I cling to is one of confusing what I know to be the same as how I act and think. The poet Kipling gives two sobering views of the end point of a man's life .
Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life. ~Lord Byron
In both poets Byron and Kipling there is a hint of this confusion , I think, unlike the works of the heroic Longfellow another of my well handled muses I seek refuge as a Mizapah.
http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_gloster.htm
The "Mary Gloster"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've paid for your sickest fancies; I've humoured your crackedest whim -
Dick, it's your daddy, dying; you've got to listen to him!
Good for a fortnight, am I? The doctor told you? He lied.
I shall go under by morning, and - Put that nurse outside.
'Never seen death yet, Dickie? Well, now is your time to learn,
And you'll wish you held my record before it comes to your turn.
Not counting the Line and the Foundry, the yards and the village, too,
I've made myself and a million; but I'm damned if I made you.
Master at two-and-twenty, and married at twenty-three -
Ten thousand men on the pay-roll, and forty freighters at sea !
Fifty years between' em, and every year of it fight,
And now I'm Sir Anthony Gloster, dying, a baronite:
For I lunched with his Royal 'Ighness - what was it the papers had ?
"Not the least of our merchant-princes." Dickie, that's me, your dad!
I didn't begin with askings. I took my job and I stuck;
I took the chances they wouldn't, an' now they're calling it luck.
Lord, what boats I've handled - rotten and leaky and old -
Ran 'em, or - opened the bilge-cock, precisely as I was told.
Grub that 'ud bind you crazy, and crews that 'ud turn you grey,
And a big fat lump of insurance to cover the risk on the way.
The others they dursn't do it; they said they valued their life
(They've served me since as skippers). I went, and I took my wife.
Over the world I drove 'em, married at twenty-three,
And your mother saving the money and making a man of me.
I was content to be master, but she said there was better behind;
She took the chances I wouldn't, and I followed your mother blind.
She egged me to borrow the money, an' she helped me to clear the loan,
When we bougnt half-shares in a cheap 'un and hoisted a flag of our own.
Patching and coaling on credit, and living the Lord knew how,
We started the Red Ox freighters - we've eight-and-thirty now.
And those were the days of clippers, and the freights were clipper-freights,
And we knew we were making our fortune, but she died in Macassar Straits -
By the Little Patemosters, as you come to the Union Bank -
And we dropped her in fourteen fathom: I pricked it off where she sank.
Owners we were, full owners, and the boat was christened for her,
And she died in the Mary Gloster. My heart; how young we were!
So I went on a spree round Java and well-nigh ran her ashore,
But your mother came and warned me and I would't liquor no more:
Strict I stuck to my business, afraid to stop or I'd think,
Saving the money (she warned me), and letting the other men drink.
And I met M'Cullough in London (I'd saved five 'undred then),
And 'tween us we started the Foundry - three forges and twenty men.
Cheap repairs for the cheap 'uns. It paid, and the business grew;
For I bought me a steam-lathe patent, and that was a gold mine too.
"Cheaper to build 'em than buy 'em;" I said, but M'Cullough he shied,
And we wasted a year in talking before we moved to the Clyde.
And the Lines were all beginning, and we all of us started fair,
Building our engines like houses and staying the boilers square.
But M'Cullough 'e wanted cabins with marble and maple and all,
And Brussels an' Utrecht velvet, and baths and a Social Hall,
And pipes for closets all over, and cutting the frames too light,
But M'Cullough he died in the Sixties, and - Well, I'm dying to-night...
I knew - I knew what was coming, when we bid on the Byfleet's keel -
They piddled and piffled with iron, I'd given my orders for steel!
Steel and the first expansions. It paid, I tell you, it paid,
When we came with our nine-knot freighters and collared the long-run trade!
And they asked me how I did it; and I gave 'em the Scripture text,
"You keep your light so shining a little in front o' the next!"
They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind,
And I left 'em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind.
Then came the armour-contracts, but that was M'Cullough's side;
He was always best in the Foundry, but better, perhaps, he died.
I went through his private papers; the notes was plainer than print;
And I'm no fool to finish if a man'll give me a hint.
(I remember his widow was angry.) So I saw what his drawings meant;
And I started the six-inch rollers, and it paid me sixty per cent.
Sixty per cent with failures, and more than twice we could do,
And a quarter-million to credit, and I saved it all for you!
I thought - it doesn't matter - you seemed to favour your ma,
But you're nearer forty than thirty, and I know the kind you are.
Harrer an' Trinity College! I ought to ha' sent you to sea -
But I stood you an education, an' what have you done for me?
The things I knew was proper you wouldn't thank me to give,
And the things I knew was rotten you said was the way to live.
For you muddled with books and pictures, an' china an' etchin's an' fans.
And your rooms at college was beastly - more like a whore's than a man's;
Till you married that thin-flanked woman, as white and as stale as a bone,
An' she gave you your social nonsense; but where's that kid o' your own?
I've seen your carriages blocking the half o' the Cromwell Road,
But never the doctor's brougham to help the missus unload.
(So there isn't even a grandchild, an' the Gloster family's done.)
Not like your mother, she isn't. She carried her freight each run.
But they died, the pore little beggars! At sea she had 'em - they died.
Only you, an' you stood it. You haven't stood much beside.
Weak, a liar, and idle, and mean as a collier's whelp
Nosing for scraps in the galley. No help - my son was no help!
So he gets three 'undred thousand, in trust and the interest paid.
I wouldn't give it you, Dickie - you see, I made it in trade.
You're saved from soiling your fingers, and if you have no child,
It all comes back to the business. 'Gad, won't your wife be wild!
'Calls and calls in her carriage, her 'andkerchief up to 'er eye:
"Daddy! dear daddy's dyin'!" and doing her best to cry.
Grateful? Oh, yes, I'm grateful, but keep her away from here.
Your mother 'ud never ha' stood 'er, and, anyhow, women are queer.
There's women will say I've married a second time. Not quite!
But give pore Aggie a hundred, and tell her your lawyers'll fight.
She was the best o' the boiling - you'll meet her before it ends.
I'm in for a row with the mother - I'll leave you settle my friends.
For a man he must go with a woman, which women don't understand -
Or the sort that say they can see it they aren't the marrying brand.
But I wanted to speak o' your mother that's Lady Gloster still;
I'm going to up and see her, without its hurting the will.
Here! Take your hand off the bell-pull. Five thousand's waiting for you,
If you'll only listen a minute, and do as I bid you do.
They'll try to prove me crazy, and, if you bungle, they can;
And I've only you to trust to! (O God, why ain't it a man?)
There's some waste money on marbles, the same as M'Cullough tried -
Marbles and mausoleums - but I call that sinful pride.
There's some ship bodies for burial - we've carried 'em, soldered and packed,
Down in their wills they wrote it, and nobody called them cracked.
But me - I've too much money, and people might . . . All my fault:
It come o' hoping for grandsons and buying that Wokin' vault...
I'm sick o' the 'ole dam' business. I'm going back where I came.
Dick, you're the son o' my body, and you'll take charge o' the same!
I want to lie by your mother, ten thousand mile away,
And they'll want to send me to Woking; and that's where you'll earn your pay.
I've thought it out on the quiet, the same as it ought to be done -
Quiet, and decent, and proper - an' here's your orders, my son.
You know the Line? You don't, though. You write to the Board, and tell
Your father's death has upset you an' you're going to cruise for a spell,
An' you'd like the Mary Gloster - I've held her ready for this -
They'll put her in working order and you'll take her out as she is.
Yes, it was money idle when I patched her and laid her aside
(Thank God, I can pay for my fancies!) - the boat where your mother died,
By the Little Paternosters, as you come to the Union Bank,
We dropped her - I think I told you - and I pricked it off where she sank.
['Tiny she looked on the grating - that oily, treacly sea -]
'Hundred and Eighteen East, remember, and South just Three.
Easy bearings to carry - Three South-Three to the dot;
But I gave McAndrew a copy in case of dying - or not.
And so you'll write to McAndrew, he's Chief of the Maori Line
They'Il give him leave, if you ask 'em and say it's business o' mine.
I built three boats for the Maoris, an' very well pleased they were,
An I've known Mac since the Fifties, and Mac knew me - and her.
After the first stroke warned me I sent him the money to keep
Against the time you'd claim it, committin' your dad to the deep;
For you are the son o' my body, and Mac was my oldest friend,
I've never asked 'im to dinner, but he'll see it out to the end.
Stiff-necked Glasgow beggar! I've heard he's prayed for my soul,
But he couldn't lie if you paid him, and he'd starve before he stole.
He'll take the Mary in ballast - you'll find her a lively ship;
And you'll take Sir Anthony Gloster, that goes on 'is wedding-trip,
Lashed in our old deck-cabin with all three port-holes wide,
The kick o' the screw beneath him and the round blue seas outside!
Sir Anthony Gloster's carriage - our 'ouse-flag flyin' free -
Ten thousand men on the pay-roll and forty freighters at sea!
He made himself and a million, but this world is a fleetin' show,
And he'll go to the wife of 'is bosom the same as he ought to go -
By the heel of the Paternosters - there isn't a chance to mistake -
And Mac'll pay you the money as soon as the bubbles break!
Five thousand for six weeks' cruising, the staunchest freighter afloat,
And Mac he'll give you your bonus the minute I'm out o' the boat!
He'll take you round to Macassar, and you'll come back alone;
He knows what I want o' the Mary . . . . I'll do what I please with my own.
Your mother 'ud call it wasteful, but I've seven-and-thirty more;
I'll come in my private carriage and bid it wait at the door...
For my son 'e was never a credit: 'e muddled with books and art,
And e' lived on Sir Anthony's money and 'e broke Sir Anthony's heart.
There isn't even a grandchild, and the Gloster family's done -
The only one you left me - O mother, the only one!
Harrer and Trinity College - me slavin' early an' late -
An' he thinks I'm dying crazy, and you're in Macassar Strait!
Flesh o' my flesh, my dearie, for ever an' ever amen,
That first stroke come for a warning. I ought to ha' gone to you then.
But - cheap repairs for a cheap 'un - the doctor said I'd do.
Mary, why didn't you warn me? I've allus heeded to you,
Excep' - I know - about women; but you are a spirit now;
An', wife, they was only women, and I was a man. That's how.
An' a man 'e must go with a woman, as you could not understand;
But I never talked 'em secrets. I paid 'em out o' hand.
Thank Gawd, I can pay for my fancies! Now what's five thousand to me,
For a berth off the Paternosters in the haven where I would be?
I believe in the Resurrection, if I read my Bible plain,
But I wouldn't trust 'em at Wokin'; we're safer at sea again.
For the heart it shall go with the treasure - go down to the sea in ships.
I'm sick of the hired women. I'll kiss my girl on her lips!
I'll be content with my fountain. I'll drink from my own well,
And the wife of my youth shall charm me - an' the rest can go to Hell!
(Dickie, he will, that's certain.) I'll lie in our standin'-bed,
An' Mac'll take her in ballast - an' she trims best by the head...
Down by the head an' sinkin', her fires are drawn and cold,
And the water's splashin' hollow on the skin of the empty hold -
Churning an' choking and chuckling, quiet and scummy and dark -
Full to her lower hatches and risin' steady. Hark!
That was the after-bulkhead. . . . She's flooded from stem to stern...
'Never seen death yet, Dickie? . . . Well, now is your time to learn!
www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm
IF.....
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
I choose to end with the Platonic ideal by Longfellow:
O Ship of State
Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
We know what Master laid thy keel,
What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel,
Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,
What anvils rang, what hammers beat,
In what a forge and what a heat
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!
Fear not each sudden sound and shock,
'Tis of the wave and not the rock;
'Tis but the flapping of the sail,
And not a rent made by the gale!
In spite of rock and tempest's roar,
In spite of false lights on the shore,
Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee.
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears,
Are all with thee, -are all with thee!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life. ~Lord Byron
In both poets Byron and Kipling there is a hint of this confusion , I think, unlike the works of the heroic Longfellow another of my well handled muses I seek refuge as a Mizapah.
http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_gloster.htm
The "Mary Gloster"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've paid for your sickest fancies; I've humoured your crackedest whim -
Dick, it's your daddy, dying; you've got to listen to him!
Good for a fortnight, am I? The doctor told you? He lied.
I shall go under by morning, and - Put that nurse outside.
'Never seen death yet, Dickie? Well, now is your time to learn,
And you'll wish you held my record before it comes to your turn.
Not counting the Line and the Foundry, the yards and the village, too,
I've made myself and a million; but I'm damned if I made you.
Master at two-and-twenty, and married at twenty-three -
Ten thousand men on the pay-roll, and forty freighters at sea !
Fifty years between' em, and every year of it fight,
And now I'm Sir Anthony Gloster, dying, a baronite:
For I lunched with his Royal 'Ighness - what was it the papers had ?
"Not the least of our merchant-princes." Dickie, that's me, your dad!
I didn't begin with askings. I took my job and I stuck;
I took the chances they wouldn't, an' now they're calling it luck.
Lord, what boats I've handled - rotten and leaky and old -
Ran 'em, or - opened the bilge-cock, precisely as I was told.
Grub that 'ud bind you crazy, and crews that 'ud turn you grey,
And a big fat lump of insurance to cover the risk on the way.
The others they dursn't do it; they said they valued their life
(They've served me since as skippers). I went, and I took my wife.
Over the world I drove 'em, married at twenty-three,
And your mother saving the money and making a man of me.
I was content to be master, but she said there was better behind;
She took the chances I wouldn't, and I followed your mother blind.
She egged me to borrow the money, an' she helped me to clear the loan,
When we bougnt half-shares in a cheap 'un and hoisted a flag of our own.
Patching and coaling on credit, and living the Lord knew how,
We started the Red Ox freighters - we've eight-and-thirty now.
And those were the days of clippers, and the freights were clipper-freights,
And we knew we were making our fortune, but she died in Macassar Straits -
By the Little Patemosters, as you come to the Union Bank -
And we dropped her in fourteen fathom: I pricked it off where she sank.
Owners we were, full owners, and the boat was christened for her,
And she died in the Mary Gloster. My heart; how young we were!
So I went on a spree round Java and well-nigh ran her ashore,
But your mother came and warned me and I would't liquor no more:
Strict I stuck to my business, afraid to stop or I'd think,
Saving the money (she warned me), and letting the other men drink.
And I met M'Cullough in London (I'd saved five 'undred then),
And 'tween us we started the Foundry - three forges and twenty men.
Cheap repairs for the cheap 'uns. It paid, and the business grew;
For I bought me a steam-lathe patent, and that was a gold mine too.
"Cheaper to build 'em than buy 'em;" I said, but M'Cullough he shied,
And we wasted a year in talking before we moved to the Clyde.
And the Lines were all beginning, and we all of us started fair,
Building our engines like houses and staying the boilers square.
But M'Cullough 'e wanted cabins with marble and maple and all,
And Brussels an' Utrecht velvet, and baths and a Social Hall,
And pipes for closets all over, and cutting the frames too light,
But M'Cullough he died in the Sixties, and - Well, I'm dying to-night...
I knew - I knew what was coming, when we bid on the Byfleet's keel -
They piddled and piffled with iron, I'd given my orders for steel!
Steel and the first expansions. It paid, I tell you, it paid,
When we came with our nine-knot freighters and collared the long-run trade!
And they asked me how I did it; and I gave 'em the Scripture text,
"You keep your light so shining a little in front o' the next!"
They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind,
And I left 'em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind.
Then came the armour-contracts, but that was M'Cullough's side;
He was always best in the Foundry, but better, perhaps, he died.
I went through his private papers; the notes was plainer than print;
And I'm no fool to finish if a man'll give me a hint.
(I remember his widow was angry.) So I saw what his drawings meant;
And I started the six-inch rollers, and it paid me sixty per cent.
Sixty per cent with failures, and more than twice we could do,
And a quarter-million to credit, and I saved it all for you!
I thought - it doesn't matter - you seemed to favour your ma,
But you're nearer forty than thirty, and I know the kind you are.
Harrer an' Trinity College! I ought to ha' sent you to sea -
But I stood you an education, an' what have you done for me?
The things I knew was proper you wouldn't thank me to give,
And the things I knew was rotten you said was the way to live.
For you muddled with books and pictures, an' china an' etchin's an' fans.
And your rooms at college was beastly - more like a whore's than a man's;
Till you married that thin-flanked woman, as white and as stale as a bone,
An' she gave you your social nonsense; but where's that kid o' your own?
I've seen your carriages blocking the half o' the Cromwell Road,
But never the doctor's brougham to help the missus unload.
(So there isn't even a grandchild, an' the Gloster family's done.)
Not like your mother, she isn't. She carried her freight each run.
But they died, the pore little beggars! At sea she had 'em - they died.
Only you, an' you stood it. You haven't stood much beside.
Weak, a liar, and idle, and mean as a collier's whelp
Nosing for scraps in the galley. No help - my son was no help!
So he gets three 'undred thousand, in trust and the interest paid.
I wouldn't give it you, Dickie - you see, I made it in trade.
You're saved from soiling your fingers, and if you have no child,
It all comes back to the business. 'Gad, won't your wife be wild!
'Calls and calls in her carriage, her 'andkerchief up to 'er eye:
"Daddy! dear daddy's dyin'!" and doing her best to cry.
Grateful? Oh, yes, I'm grateful, but keep her away from here.
Your mother 'ud never ha' stood 'er, and, anyhow, women are queer.
There's women will say I've married a second time. Not quite!
But give pore Aggie a hundred, and tell her your lawyers'll fight.
She was the best o' the boiling - you'll meet her before it ends.
I'm in for a row with the mother - I'll leave you settle my friends.
For a man he must go with a woman, which women don't understand -
Or the sort that say they can see it they aren't the marrying brand.
But I wanted to speak o' your mother that's Lady Gloster still;
I'm going to up and see her, without its hurting the will.
Here! Take your hand off the bell-pull. Five thousand's waiting for you,
If you'll only listen a minute, and do as I bid you do.
They'll try to prove me crazy, and, if you bungle, they can;
And I've only you to trust to! (O God, why ain't it a man?)
There's some waste money on marbles, the same as M'Cullough tried -
Marbles and mausoleums - but I call that sinful pride.
There's some ship bodies for burial - we've carried 'em, soldered and packed,
Down in their wills they wrote it, and nobody called them cracked.
But me - I've too much money, and people might . . . All my fault:
It come o' hoping for grandsons and buying that Wokin' vault...
I'm sick o' the 'ole dam' business. I'm going back where I came.
Dick, you're the son o' my body, and you'll take charge o' the same!
I want to lie by your mother, ten thousand mile away,
And they'll want to send me to Woking; and that's where you'll earn your pay.
I've thought it out on the quiet, the same as it ought to be done -
Quiet, and decent, and proper - an' here's your orders, my son.
You know the Line? You don't, though. You write to the Board, and tell
Your father's death has upset you an' you're going to cruise for a spell,
An' you'd like the Mary Gloster - I've held her ready for this -
They'll put her in working order and you'll take her out as she is.
Yes, it was money idle when I patched her and laid her aside
(Thank God, I can pay for my fancies!) - the boat where your mother died,
By the Little Paternosters, as you come to the Union Bank,
We dropped her - I think I told you - and I pricked it off where she sank.
['Tiny she looked on the grating - that oily, treacly sea -]
'Hundred and Eighteen East, remember, and South just Three.
Easy bearings to carry - Three South-Three to the dot;
But I gave McAndrew a copy in case of dying - or not.
And so you'll write to McAndrew, he's Chief of the Maori Line
They'Il give him leave, if you ask 'em and say it's business o' mine.
I built three boats for the Maoris, an' very well pleased they were,
An I've known Mac since the Fifties, and Mac knew me - and her.
After the first stroke warned me I sent him the money to keep
Against the time you'd claim it, committin' your dad to the deep;
For you are the son o' my body, and Mac was my oldest friend,
I've never asked 'im to dinner, but he'll see it out to the end.
Stiff-necked Glasgow beggar! I've heard he's prayed for my soul,
But he couldn't lie if you paid him, and he'd starve before he stole.
He'll take the Mary in ballast - you'll find her a lively ship;
And you'll take Sir Anthony Gloster, that goes on 'is wedding-trip,
Lashed in our old deck-cabin with all three port-holes wide,
The kick o' the screw beneath him and the round blue seas outside!
Sir Anthony Gloster's carriage - our 'ouse-flag flyin' free -
Ten thousand men on the pay-roll and forty freighters at sea!
He made himself and a million, but this world is a fleetin' show,
And he'll go to the wife of 'is bosom the same as he ought to go -
By the heel of the Paternosters - there isn't a chance to mistake -
And Mac'll pay you the money as soon as the bubbles break!
Five thousand for six weeks' cruising, the staunchest freighter afloat,
And Mac he'll give you your bonus the minute I'm out o' the boat!
He'll take you round to Macassar, and you'll come back alone;
He knows what I want o' the Mary . . . . I'll do what I please with my own.
Your mother 'ud call it wasteful, but I've seven-and-thirty more;
I'll come in my private carriage and bid it wait at the door...
For my son 'e was never a credit: 'e muddled with books and art,
And e' lived on Sir Anthony's money and 'e broke Sir Anthony's heart.
There isn't even a grandchild, and the Gloster family's done -
The only one you left me - O mother, the only one!
Harrer and Trinity College - me slavin' early an' late -
An' he thinks I'm dying crazy, and you're in Macassar Strait!
Flesh o' my flesh, my dearie, for ever an' ever amen,
That first stroke come for a warning. I ought to ha' gone to you then.
But - cheap repairs for a cheap 'un - the doctor said I'd do.
Mary, why didn't you warn me? I've allus heeded to you,
Excep' - I know - about women; but you are a spirit now;
An', wife, they was only women, and I was a man. That's how.
An' a man 'e must go with a woman, as you could not understand;
But I never talked 'em secrets. I paid 'em out o' hand.
Thank Gawd, I can pay for my fancies! Now what's five thousand to me,
For a berth off the Paternosters in the haven where I would be?
I believe in the Resurrection, if I read my Bible plain,
But I wouldn't trust 'em at Wokin'; we're safer at sea again.
For the heart it shall go with the treasure - go down to the sea in ships.
I'm sick of the hired women. I'll kiss my girl on her lips!
I'll be content with my fountain. I'll drink from my own well,
And the wife of my youth shall charm me - an' the rest can go to Hell!
(Dickie, he will, that's certain.) I'll lie in our standin'-bed,
An' Mac'll take her in ballast - an' she trims best by the head...
Down by the head an' sinkin', her fires are drawn and cold,
And the water's splashin' hollow on the skin of the empty hold -
Churning an' choking and chuckling, quiet and scummy and dark -
Full to her lower hatches and risin' steady. Hark!
That was the after-bulkhead. . . . She's flooded from stem to stern...
'Never seen death yet, Dickie? . . . Well, now is your time to learn!
www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm
IF.....
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
I choose to end with the Platonic ideal by Longfellow:
O Ship of State
Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
We know what Master laid thy keel,
What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel,
Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,
What anvils rang, what hammers beat,
In what a forge and what a heat
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!
Fear not each sudden sound and shock,
'Tis of the wave and not the rock;
'Tis but the flapping of the sail,
And not a rent made by the gale!
In spite of rock and tempest's roar,
In spite of false lights on the shore,
Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee.
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears,
Are all with thee, -are all with thee!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
